What are Wii Thinking, Nintendo?

On October 10, 2010

Now, I can tell you, We love our Wii. Most people who own them usually think they are a great deal of fun, including my wife and me. There are some things about it that I don’t quite understand though. Like why there haven’t been any significant changes to the platform since it came out in 2006.

Now I understand Nintendo’s position on it being a gaming console, and sticking to their guns on marketing it as strictly that. But with Sony’s new “Move” controller campaign, and the Xbox Kinect around the corner, the Wii stands to lose their edge when it comes to how we interact with our video games. It doesn’t matter if Nintendo still has the BEST motion controller, the competition moving into the motion controller game is going to cause serious problems with Nintendo’s market share.

This isn’t because the Wii isn’t a good gaming console, don’t get me wrong. This is because we can’t do anything else with our Wii systems but play games. Once upon a time, if you had a copy of twilight princess, an SD card, an internet connection, and nerves of steel (if you had to scrape up cash to buy your console), you could hack your console to install homebrew channels. Once you successfully installed homebrew channels, you could then install a DVD player app on the machine. I, for the life of me, don’t understand why Nintendo hasn’t put a legitimate DVD player channel in the Wii Shop Channel in the past 4 years.

To add to that, why hasn’t Nintendo done more to make their channels more app friendly? Why can’t my Wii have a Facebook or Twitter channel? Why does my Netflix require a disk to stream movies from the internet, instead of just accessing that with a channel? Why can’t YouTubeXL be an app? My console has USB ports, why can we not use a skype app?

This is not to pick on the Wii, because as I said, my wife and I, we love our Wii. I just wish the thing would get with the times as we are about to enter the next decade.

UPDATE: Just over a week after I posted this, I got an email from netflix:

3 Responses to “What are Wii Thinking, Nintendo?”

Well, to be fair the PS3 requires you to have a disc for Netflixing as well. However, they’re taking a queue from the Xbox 360 and installing the app to the HDD. I would have to disagree with the Wii having the beat motion controller because with Kinect, you are the controller! I can’t think of a better controller than me. 😉 I’m not really sure that Nintendo can really do much to approve upon the Wii except maybe add Hi-Def output. That was once in the rumor mill, but I’m not sure what’s going on there at this point. The hardware had limitations, but you can’t argue that they’ve outsold every other console consistently since it’s release. The Wii sales have slowed drastically with the Xbox outselling the Wii on several occasions according to the monthly NPD numbers. The software attachment rate is still not that great and the software titles are just not console moving in my opinion. I believe the casual games fell in love with the concept and now the hype is dwindling away.

I do want to point out that I wasn’t making the argument that Nintendo has the best motion controller, I was more so responding to the fact that the big N would likely make that argument. As far as Kinect goes, though, I might have to disagree with you. Sony makes a good point when they badmouth XBox motion controller for not having buttons! not to say they can’t invent some kinda accessory to compensate for that, though. Thanks for the comment though